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One sitemap to rule them all

Looks like Google and Yahoo united to create a unified sitemap format: www.sitemaps.org. According to the website even Microsoft will support it. Finally, a consensus that will make webmasters' lives easier.

Looks like Google and Yahoo united to create a unified sitemap format: www.sitemaps.org. According to the website even Microsoft will support it. Finally, a consensus that will make webmasters' lives easier.

Yes, I agree with you.This certainly a very good news for all webmasters.

Once you have created the Sitemap file and placed it on your webserver, you submit it to search engines that support the Sitemaps protocol. The search engines can then retrieve your Sitemap and make the URLs available to their crawlers. Refer to each search engine's documentation for more information about submitting to them. You can also submit your Sitemap using an HTTP request (replace <searchengine_URL> with the URL provided by the search engine):
Issue your request to the following URL:

You can issue the HTTP request using wget, curl, or another mechanism of your choosing. A successful request will return an HTTP 200 response code; if you receive a different response, you should resubmit your request. The HTTP 200 response code only indicates that the search engine has received your Sitemap, not that the Sitemap itself or the URLs contained in it were valid. An easy way to do this is to set up an automated job to generate and submit Sitemaps on a regular basis.

Note: If you are providing a Sitemap index file, you only need to issue one HTTP request that includes the location of the Sitemap index file; you do not need to issue individual requests for each Sitemap listed in the index.

You can issue the HTTP request using wget, curl, or another mechanism of your choosing. A successful request will return an HTTP 200 response code; if you receive a different response, you should resubmit your request. The HTTP 200 response code only indicates that the search engine has received your Sitemap, not that the Sitemap itself or the URLs contained in it were valid. An easy way to do this is to set up an automated job to generate and submit Sitemaps on a regular basis.

Can anyone please explain that pinging the other search engines bit? So i include that within my site map? or do i ping....? how?